Today I have been planning my year 6 ICT, basing our work on the Switched On ICT “We are Games Makers” unit. The plans in Switched On are throughly written and contain all you need to plan and teach a rigorous set of lessons and assess the pupil within each block of work. However, things are flexible enough for you to build on the original documents and use different software to that which they suggest. What’s more they actively encourage you to build in extensions and take alternative routes through the units.

With this in mind I have extended the printed unit to include 2D platform game design using 2DIY. If you have not seen 2DIY, then you have missed out on an accessible and yet wide-ranging game creation tool. 2DIY was created by Max Wainewright , who was keen that children had the opportunity to begin to experiment with scripts and variables. And so, with 2DIY children can easily create games in a short period of time. (During one lesson I taught,a group of Year 6 girls had a pretty impressive maze game built-in a bout 15 minutes.) Following this the children could move on to a more challenging plain, by exposing and altering some of the variables in the action script of their game. As shown in this rather quiet video put together during my time at 2Simple.

You can see lots of examples of these scripts and how to change them on the 2DIY archive run by Simon Widdowson. Alongside Simon’s examples, I worked with Nicholas Hughes of the Redbridge Games Network and the art team at 2Simple to draw out these handy reference cards (see slideshow above) ,as a reminder of how to use script to create a “power up” for example. These would look great enlarged and blue tacked up in an ICT room.